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1
Introduction:
Last
Looks,
Last
Books
There
is
a
custom
in
Ireland
called
“taking
the
last
look.” When
you
find
yourself
bedridden,
with
death
approaching,
you
rouse
yourself
with
effort
and,
for
the
last
time,
make
the
rounds
of
your
territory,
North,
East,
South,
West,
as
you
con­
template
the
places
and
things
that
have
constituted
your
life.
After
this
last
task,
you
can
return
to
your
bed
and
die.
W.
B.
Yeats
recalls
in
letters
how
his
friend
Lady
Gregory,
dying
of
breast
cancer,
performed
her
version
of
the
last
look.
Although
for
months
she
had
remained
upstairs
in
her
bedroom,
three
days
before
she
died
she
arose
from
her
chair—she
had
refused
to
take
to
her
bed—and
painfully
descended
the
stairs,
making
a
final
circuit
of
the
downstairs
rooms
before
returning
up­
stairs
and
finally
allowing
herself
to
lie
down.
And
Yeats
him­
self,
a
few
years
later,
took
his
last
look
in
a
sonnet
called
“Meru,”
which
cast
a
final
glance
over
all
his
cultural
territory:
“Egypt
and
Greece,
good­bye,
and
good­bye,
Rome!”
In
many
lyrics,
poets
have
taken,
if
not
a
last
look,
a
very
late
look
at
the
interface
at
which
death
meets
life,
and
my
topic
is
the
strange
binocular
style
they
must
invent
to
render
the
real­
ity
contemplated
in
that
last
look.
The
poet,
still
alive
but
aware
of
the
imminence
of
death,
wishes
to
enact
that
deeply
shad­
owed
but
still
vividly
alert
moment;
but
how
can
the
manner
of
a
poem
do
justice
to
both
the
looming
presence
of
death
and
the
unabated
vitality
of
spirit?
Although
death
is
a
frequent
theme
in
European
literature,
any
response
to
it
used
to
be
for­
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CHAPTER
ONE
tifi
ed
by
the
belief
in
a
personal
afterlife.
Yet
as
the
conviction
of
the
soul’s
afterlife
waned,
poets
had
to
invent
what
Wallace
Stevens
called
“the
mythology
of
modern
death.”
In
the
pages
that
follow,
I
take
the
theme
of
death
and
the
genre
of
elegy
as
given
and
focus
instead
on
the
problem
of
style
in
poems
con­
fronting
not
death
in
general,
nor
the
death
of
someone
else,
but
personal
extinction.
I
draw
my
chief
examples
of
such
po­
etry
from
the
last
books
of
some
modern
American
poets:
Wallace
Stevens,
Sylvia
Plath,
Robert
Lowell,
Elizabeth
Bishop,
and
James
Merrill.
The
last
books
of
other
American
poets—John
Berryman,
A.
R.
Ammons—could
equally
well
have
been
chosen,
but
the
poems
I
cite
illustrate
with
particu­
lar
distinction
both
the
rewards
and
the
hazards
of
presenting
life
and
death
as
mutually,
and
demandingly,
real
within
a
sin­
gle
poem’s
symbolic
system.
Before
I
come
to
describe
pre­modern
practice
in
such
po­
ems,
I
want
to
illustrate
very
briefl
y
in
two
poets,
Stevens
and
Merrill,
what
I
mean
by
“the
problem
of
style”
in
a
poem
that
wishes
to
be
equally
fair
to
both
life
and
death
at
once.
Both
poets
show
style
as
powerfully
diverted
from
expected
norms
by
the
stress
of
approaching
death.
The
first
of
these
poems
is
by
Wallace
Stevens,
and
it
is
called
“The
Hermitage
at
the
Cen­
ter.”
(Even
its
title
is
baffling;
the
poem
has
no
hermitage
and
no
hermit,
at
least
at
first
glance):
the
hermitage
at
the
center
The
leaves
on
the
macadam
make
a
noise—
How
soft
the
grass
on
which
the
desired
Reclines
in
the
temperature
of
heaven—
Like
tales
that
were
told
the
day
before
yesterday—
Sleek
in
a
natural
nakedness,
She
attends
the
tintinnabula—
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INTRODUCTION:
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And
the
wind
sways
like
a
great
thing
tottering—
Of
birds
called
up
by
more
than
the
sun,
Birds
of
more
wit,
that
substitute—
Which
suddenly
is
all
dissolved
and
gone—
Their
intelligible
twittering
For
unintelligible
thought.
And
yet
this
end
and
this
beginning
are
one,
And
one
last
look
at
the
ducks
is
a
look
At
lucent
children
round
her
in
a
ring.1
Stevens
has
here
presented
a
poem
that
seems
unintelligible
as
one
reads
it
line
by
line.
It
contains,
as
we
eventually
realize,
two
poems
that
have
been
interdigitated—one
of
death,
one
of
life,
converging
in
a
joint
coda.
The
first
poem—that
of
death,
of
seasonal
end,
of
unintelligible
extinction—can
be
seen
by
reading
in
succession
the
opening
lines
of
the
first
four
tercets:
The
leaves
on
the
macadam
make
a
noise
Like
tales
that
were
told
the
day
before
yesterday,
And
the
wind
sways
like
a
great
thing
tottering,
Which
suddenly
is
all
dissolved
and
gone.
The
second
poem—that
of
love,
of
inception,
of
the
intelligi­
bility
implicit
in
song—can
be
seen
by
reading
in
succession
the
latter
two
lines
of
the
first
four
tercets,
which
describe
the
ever­recurrent
appearance
in
nature
(and
in
human
nature)
of
spring,
sexuality,
warmth,
birdsong,
love,
and
children:
How
soft
the
grass
on
which
the
desired
Reclines
in
the
temperature
of
heaven;
Sleek
in
a
natural
nakedness,
She
attends
the
tintinnabula
Of
birds
called
up
by
more
than
the
sun,
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CHAPTER
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Birds
of
more
wit,
that
substitute
Their
intelligible
twittering
For
unintelligible
thought.
The
coda,
declaring
the
overlap
of
the
two
previous
poems,
me­
morializes
Stevens’s
daily
walk
to
work
through
Hartford’s
Elizabeth
Park,
with
its
duck
pond.
Stevens
takes
his
last
look
at
his
favorite
place
and
sees
spring:
And
yet
this
end
and
this
beginning
are
one,
And
one
last
look
at
the
ducks
is
a
look
At
lucent
children
round
her
in
a
ring.
As
the
poet
wonders
how
to
render
not
only
his
own
unin­
telligible
physical
tottering,
creative
depletion,
and
expected
dissolution
but
also
the
soft
grass,
the
little
ducklings,
and
the
intelligible
presence
of
a
reposing
Primavera,
he
feels
that
both
are
equally
true,
and
must
be
simultaneously
held
in
a
binocu­
lar
frame
in
which
neither
can
obliterate
or
dominate
the
other.
He
is
the
hermit,
now
without
a
beloved,
meditating
in
his
as­
cetic
hermitage
as
he
slips
toward
death;
but
he
does
not
allow
himself
to
deny
the
beautiful,
desirable,
erotic,
and
fertile
spring
that
assuages
him
even
as
he
loses
it.
What
he
decides
to
reproduce
in
the
style
of
his
poem
is
the
unintelligibility
pre­
sented
to
us
by
death,
which
forces
us
to
sort
out
the
conflict­
ing
but
coordinate
pieces
of
our
perceptions
and
thoughts.
Yet
even
the
unintelligible­when­first­read
“Hermitage”
reveals,
stanza
by
stanza,
a
fixed
pattern
of
recursive
intelligibility
when
understood,
reinforcing
the
claim
for
the
ultimately
“in­
telligible
twittering”
of
the
poetic
mind.
A
comparably
strong
distortion
of
form
in
the
service
of
a
binocular
gaze
appears
in
the
very
late
poem
by
James
Merrill
called
“Christmas
Tree.”2
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christmas
tree
To
be
Brought
down
at
last
From
the
cold
sighing
mountain
Where
I
and
the
others
Had
been
fed,
looked
after,
kept
still,
Meant,
I
knew—of
course
I
knew—
That
it
would
be
only
a
matter
of
weeks,
That
there
was
nothing
more
to
do.
Warmly
they
took
me
in,
made
much
of
me,
The
point
from
the
start
was
to
keep
my
spirits
up.
I
could
assent
to
that.
For
honestly,
It
did
help
to
be
wound
in
jewels,
to
send
Their
colors
flashing
forth
from
vents
in
the
deep
Fragrant
sable
that
cloaked
me
head
to
foot.
Over
me
then
they
wove
a
spell
of
shining—
Purple
and
silver
chains,
eavesdripping
tinsel,
Amulets,
milagros:
software
of
silver,
A
heart,
a
little
girl,
a
Model
T,
Two
staring
eyes.
The
angels,
trumpets,
BUD
and
BEA
(The
children’s
names)
in
clownlike
capitals,
Somewhere
a
music
box
whose
tiny
song
Played
and
replayed
I
ended
before
long
By
loving.
And
in
shadow
behind
me,
a
primitive
IV
To
keep
the
show
going.
Yes,
yes,
what
lay
ahead
Was
clear:
the
stripping,
the
cold
street,
my
chemicals
Plowed
back
into
Earth
for
lives
to
come—
No
doubt
a
blessing,
a
harvest,
but
one
that
doesn’t
bear,
Now
or
ever,
dwelling
upon.
To
have
grown
so
thin.
Needles
and
bone.
The
little
boy’s
hands
meeting
About
my
spine.
The
mother’s
voice:
Holding up wonderfully!
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CHAPTER
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No
dread.
No
bitterness.
The
end
beginning.
Today’s
Dusk
room
aglow
For
the
last
time
With
candlelight.
Faces
love
lit,
Gifts
underfoot.
Still
to
be
so
poised,
so
Receptive.
Still
to
recall,
to
praise.
I
will
return
to
“Christmas
Tree”
in
the
final
chapter
of
this
book,
but
for
now
I
simply
want
to
describe
this
as
a
work
in
the
immemorial
tradition
of
the
shaped
poem.
It
is
a
Christ­
mas
tree
missing
its
left
half.
The
forest
tree
is
already
dead,
because
it
has
previously
been
cut
down.
But
in
the
house,
it
gives
every
appearance,
with
its
still­green
needles,
of
being
alive
and
even
of
being
more
beautiful
than
before,
feeling
the
warmth
brought
to
its
ornamented
presence
by
the
pleasure
of
the
children
regarding
it.
Merrill—already
fatally
ill
with
AIDS,
but
still
wholly
alive
in
spirit—invents
his
Christmas
tree,
half
ghost,
half
evergreen,
as
a
symbolic
expression
of
that
late
binocular
style
which
is
my
subject.
I
hope
to
give
perspective
to
these
modern
attempts
(and
others
that
I
will
take
up
in
later
chapters)
by
looking
back
at
how
older
poets
(who
still
imagined
another
world
beyond
this
one)
found
a
style
adequate
to
the
interface
of
death
and
life.
Not
all
the
poems
I
mention
were
written
by
poets
at
the
brink
of
death,
but
they
all
confront
the
diffi
culty
of
representing,
within
the
active
horizon
of
life,
the
onset
of
death
at
that
mo­
ment
when,
as
Coleridge
writes,
“like
strangers
shelt’ring
from
a
storm,
/
Hope
and
Despair
meet
in
the
porch
of
Death”
(“Constancy
to
an
Ideal
Object”).
How
to
depict
that
meeting
within
a
sustained
binocular
view
preoccupies
any
poet
treat­
ing
the
supervening
of
death
on
life.
We
find
Emily
Dickinson,
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for
instance,
situating
in
a
closed
carriage
the
meeting
of
hu­
man
Hope
(first)
and
Despair
(ultimately)
with
Death.
As
the
poet
enters,
she
says
confidently—with,
one
might
say,
a
hope­
ful
monocular
view—that
the
carriage
contains,
besides
her­
self
and
her
gentleman
escort
Death,
an
entity
that
she
calls
“Immortality”:
Because
I
could
not
stop
for
Death
­
He
kindly
stopped
for
me
­
The
Carriage
held
but
just
Ourselves
­
And
Immortality.
But
when
the
carriage
ultimately
stops
at
her
grave,
Dickinson
suspects
a
less
certain
future
for
herself
than
“Immortality,”
and,
turning
her
view
into
a
binocular
one,
substitutes
for
“Im­
mortality”
a
quite
different
and
impersonal
abstract
noun,
“Eternity”:
Since
then
­
’tis
Centuries
­
and
yet
Feels
shorter
than
the
Day
I
first
surmised
the
Horses’
Heads
Were
toward
Eternity
­
3
That
faceless
and
nameless
“Eternity”
is
infi
nitely
far
from
the
hopeful
personal
“ Immortality”
promised
by
Dickinson’s
child­
hood
Christianity;
and
the
two
abstract
nouns,
so
similar
in
form
and
so
different
in
meaning,
face
each
other
in
a
dark
in­
tellectual
space,
guaranteeing
our
realization
of
Dickinson’s
two
proposals:
one
of
individual
everlasting
life,
and
the
other
of
featureless
and
blank
“Eternity.”
In
another
instance
of
how
a
binocular
vision
may
be
ex­
pressed,
George
Herbert
(1593–1633),
in
“Death”
(a
poem
to
be
seen
more
closely
later),
presents
the
riddling
interface
of
life
and
death
by
contemplating,
like
Hamlet,
a
skull.
Because
to
Herbert
the
open
mouth
of
the
living
body
signifi
ed
song,
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the
poet,
thinking
of
his
own
death,
remembers
his
shudder
when
he
thought
the
skull
mouth
a
hideous
void:
Death,
thou
wast
once
an
uncouth
hideous
thing
Nothing
but
bones,
The
sad
effect
of
sadder
grones:
Thy
mouth
was
open,
but
thou
couldst
not
sing.4
By
superimposing,
as
in
a
double
exposure,
the
open
mouth
of
the
death’s­head
on
the
open
mouth
of
song,
Herbert
forces
us
to
see
both
images
simultaneously.
Dickinson’s
and
Herbert’s
lines
represent
two
achievements
of
binocular
style
in
pre­twentieth­century
poets.
Before
I
re­
turn
to
Herbert,
I
will
consider
in
some
detail
poems
by
two
other
seventeenth­century
poets,
Edmund
Waller
(1606–87)
and
John
Donne
(1572–1631).
Both
set
themselves
the
same
stylistic
problem:
how
to
represent
the
meeting
place
of
life
and
death
as
materially
confined
but
conceptually
limitless.
Waller
envisages
not
only
the
limited
body,
“the
soul’s
dark
cottage,”
but
also
the
cosmic
threshold
between
an
old
world
and
a
ce­
lestial
new
one.
Donne,
although
meeting
Death
in
the
con­
fines
of
a
narrow
sickroom,
announces
that
this
is
the
moment
of
his
grand
“south­west
discovery,”
his
far
Magellanic
voyage
through
straits
whose
currents
“yield
return
to
none.”
Each
poet
must
find
a
manner
by
which
to
enact
the
fraught
nature
of
this
moment,
coordinating,
in
the
case
of
Waller,
both
the
dark
cottage
and
the
invisible
threshold,
and
rendering
credi­
ble,
in
the
case
of
Donne,
both
the
catastrophe
of
death
and
the
resurrection
to
come.
I
begin
with
Waller’s
infinitely
touching
poem
“Of
the
Last
Verses
in
the
Book.”
The
poet
tells
us
that
he
has
become
blind
and
can
no
longer
read
or
write.
But
before
he
drops
his
pen,
he
writes
out
his
“last
verses,”
composed
less
by
the
mortal
body
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(with
its
unruly
passions)
than
by
the
unbodied
soul
(who
is,
as
anima,
female).
Weighing
his
present
painful
physical
blind­
ness
against
a
past
mental
blindness
to
heavenly
realities,
Waller
shows
stoic
resolve:
When
we
for
Age
could
neither
read
nor
write,
The
Subject
made
us
able
to
indite.
The
Soul,
with
Nobler
Resolutions
deckt,
The
Body
stooping,
does
Herself
erect:
No
Mortal
Parts
are
requisite
to
raise
Her,
that
Unbody’d
can
her
Maker
praise.
The
Seas
are
quiet,
when
the
Winds
give
o’er,
So
calm
are
we,
when
Passions
are
no
more:
For
then
we
know
how
vain
it
was
to
boast
Of
fl
eeting
Things,
so
certain
to
be
lost.
Clouds
of
Affection
from
our
younger
Eyes
Conceal
that
emptiness,
which
Age
descries.
The
Soul’s
dark
Cottage,
batter’d
and
decay’d,
Lets
in
new
Light
thrô
chinks
that
time
has
made;
Stronger
by
weakness,
wiser
Men
become
As
they
draw
near
to
their
Eternal
home:
Leaving
the
Old,
both
Worlds
at
once
they
view,
That
stand
upon
the
Threshold
of
the
New.
—Miratur Limen Olympi, Virgil5
Because
Waller,
remembering
the
Virgilian
threshold
of
Olympus,
is
convinced
that
“The
Soul’s
dark
Cottage
.
.
.
/
Lets
in
new
Light
thrô
chinks
that
time
has
made,”
he
needs
to
make
real
to
us
both
bodily
darkness
and
spiritual
light.
His
first
sestet
conveys
the
physical
darkness:
we
hear
that
the
poet
can
neither
read
nor
write,
and
that
his
body
is
stooping.
By
the
second
sestet,
the
great
initial
effort
required
to
erect
the
soul
and
“indite”
under
the
condition
of
blindness
has
subsided
into
a
reflection
on
the
calming
of
the
passions.
There
is
no
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CHAPTER
ONE
compensatory
light
as
yet,
but
the
poet
has
begun
to
recon­
sider
his
present
blindness—was
he
not
more
blind
earlier
in
life,
when
passion’s “clouds
of
affection”
concealed
from
his
eyes
the
emptiness
of
worldly
“fl
eeting
things”?
By
the
third
sestet,
a
sustaining
spiritual
illumination
arrives,
not
through
the
eyes
but—in
an
arresting
and
poignant
metaphor—through
the
very
wounds
suffered
by
the
“batter’d
and
decay’d”
body.
(The
adjectives
illustrate
the
double
plight
of
trauma
and
age.)
Successively
opened
“chinks”
take
over
the
function
of
the
lost
eyes,
and
the
rays
of
a
hitherto
unknown
light
are
thereby
en­
abled,
through
trauma,
to
penetrate
the
“dark
cottage”
of
mor­
tality.
As
the
soul
prepares
to
cross
the
threshold
dividing
earth
from
heaven,
her
illumination
gradually
increases
until,
paradoxically
stronger
in
weakness
and
wiser
in
blindness,
she
sees
herself
approaching
the
source
of
light,
a
whole
new
world.
Or
so
it
would
be
if
the
poem
had
been
written
in
the
first­
person
singular.
But
we
perceive
that
Waller
has
begun
in
the
fi
rst­person
plural
(extending
his
poem
to
all
of
us
in
our
last
days)
and
that
he
has,
unexpectedly,
spoken
of
his
soul
and
his
body
in
third­person
abstraction—“the
Soul,”
“the
Body”—as
though
he
were
already
beginning
to
detach
himself
from
them
as
they
prepare
to
detach
themselves
from
one
another.
By
the
time
of
the
third
stanza,
all
reference
is
voiced
in
the
third­
person
plural:
“men”
become
stronger
and
wiser,
and
“they”
view
two
worlds
at
once.
Waller
cannot
as
yet
join
such
men
on
the
preparatory
threshold
of
death;
he
is
still
alive.
But
he
is
old
enough,
and
blind
enough,
to
say,
in
the
present
tense
of
old
age,
that
men
become,
by
their
newly
admitted
spiritual
light,
stronger
and
wiser
as
they
“draw
near
to
their
Eternal
home.”
Nothing
any
longer
is
“fleeting”—all
worldly
attractions
have
fled
for
good.
Th
e
effect
of
balance
in
the
last
two
lines,
as
the
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INTRODUCTION:
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poet
imagines
a
momentary
pause
on
the
journey
“home,”
de­
pends
on
his
creating
for
us,
by
means
of
style,
that
threshold
on
which
the
soul
will
stand.
The
main
affi
rmation
of
the
close—“both
Worlds
at
once
they
view”—is
poised
evenly
be­
tween
“Leaving
the
Old”
and
“the
Threshold
of
the
New,”
while
the
“old”
of
departure
becomes
incorporated
into
the
“thresh­
old”
of
anticipation.
And
in
this
truly
binocular
vision,
the
free­
standing
adjective
“New,”
closing
the
poem
and
predicated
of
the
celestial
World,
is
ratified
by
its
echo
of
the
earlier
phrase
“new
Light,”
which
evoked
the
soul’s
first
glimpse,
within
its
“dark
Cottage,”
of
the
rays
of
heaven.
Wallace
Stevens’s
elegy
for
George
Santayana,
“To
an
Old
Philosopher
in
Rome,”
enables
us
to
see
Waller’s
poem
resonat­
ing,
but
changed,
within
modern
writing.
Stevens
borrows
Waller’s
Virgilian
image
of
the
“threshold”
for
the
interface
of
life
and
death.
But
Stevens
cannot
echo
Waller’s
confi
dence
in
a
“new
World”
beyond
that
threshold
and
must
create
a
diff
er­
ent
binocular
view
of
Santayana’s
death
and
life.
Stevens
begins
in
Waller’s
vein,
speaking
of
Santayana,
still
alive
in
Rome,
as
being
poised
“on
the
threshold
of
heaven,”
but
the
modern
poet
conceives
heaven
in
a
secular
fashion—as
the
full
realization,
in
time,
of
what
we
have
seen,
desired,
and
created
in
life.
Ste­
vens
asserts
that
“the
threshold,
Rome,
and
that
more
merciful
Rome
/
Beyond”
are
“alike
in
the
make
of
the
mind”:
It
is
as
if
in
a
human
dignity
Two
parallels
become
one,
a
perspective,
of
which
Men
are
part
both
in
the
inch
and
in
the
mile.
Santayana,
Stevens
continues,
is
“a
citizen
of
heaven
though
still
of
Rome.”
At
the
moment
of
death,
it
is
Santayana’s
life­
long
creation,
his
edifice
of
thought,
that
becomes,
in
Stevens’s
view,
a
final
architecture
of
“total
grandeur
at
the
end.”
Santay­
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CHAPTER
ONE
ana,
through
his
philosophical
imagination,
inhabits
the
“total
grandeur
of
a
total
edifi
ce”:
Total
grandeur
of
a
total
edifi
ce,
Chosen
by
an
inquisitor
of
structures
For
himself.
He
stops
upon
this
threshold,
As
if
the
design
of
all
his
words
takes
form
And
frame
from
thinking
and
is
realized.
If
we
try
to
think
of
an
alternative
way
in
which
Waller
might
have
imagined
his
last
days,
we
could
conceive
of
his
staging
“Of
the
Last
Verses”
as
a
gradual
and
fulfilling
chrono­
logical
pilgrimage
during
which
the
soul,
at
first
full
of
youth­
ful
passions,
journeys
downward
into
the
sadness
and
blind­
ness
of
age
until,
facing
the
threshold
of
eternity,
it
becomes
aware
that
its
suffering
has
enabled
it
to
see
celestial
light
and,
at
the
end,
the
new
World
from
which
the
light
issues.
But
that
linear
teleological
advance
would
have
minimized
the
poet’s
actual
state
at
the
time
of
writing—he
is
stooping,
blind,
af­
flicted,
inhabiting
a
“batter’d
cottage.”
We
are
eventually
per­
mitted
to
feel
the
vitality­within­decay
of
the
new
light,
made
so
physically
real
by
the
painful
“chinks”
through
which
it
pen­
etrates,
but
at
the
same
time
we
encounter,
even
on
the
thresh­
old
of
eternal
light,
the
weak
and
hampered
state
of
the
poet’s
body.
Waller
sums
up
his
binocular
view
in
the
phrase
“stron­
ger
by
weakness,”
which
by
its
paradoxical
style
asserts
the
in­
extricability,
at
the
interface
of
life
and
death,
of
bodily
failure
and
spiritual
strength.
Stevens,
too,
for
all
the
grandeur
he
as­
cribes
to
Santayana,
makes
us
feel
the
body’s
decline
as
he
pleads
with
Santayana
to
articulate
for
us
the
nature
of
mod­
ern
death.
Like
Waller,
Stevens
imagines
a
paradoxical
gran­
deur
found
only
in
misery
and
ruin.
Addressing
Santayana,
Stevens
describes
him
as
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INTRODUCTION:
LAST
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LAST
BOOKS
Impatient
for
the
grandeur
that
you
need
In
so
much
misery;
and
yet
finding
it
Only
in
misery,
the
affl
atus
of
ruin,
Profound
poetry
of
the
poor
and
of
the
dead.
Other
convincing
transmutations
of
Christian
elegy
by
modern
poets
will
appear
later
in
this
book.
But
now
I
turn
back
from
Stevens’s
echoing
of
Waller’s
threshold
and
the
pain
preceding
it
to
my
second
example
of
the
style
of
Christian
poets
who
delineate
the
state
of
living
in
the
face
of
death
while
expecting
a
future
in
heaven.
John
Donne’s
self­elegy
“A
Hymn
to
God
My
God,
in
My
Sickness”
reveals
that
Donne,
terrifi
ed
at
the
actuality
of
death,
adopts
as
his
first
strategy
an
attempt
to
deny
as
much
as
possible
a
truly
binocular
view,
emphasiz­
ing
instead
a
stereoscopic
assimilation
of
the
fearful
unknown
reaches
of
death
to
the
known
dimensions
of
life.
Th
e
poet’s
sickroom
becomes,
by
this
will
to
similarity,
an
antechamber
to
God’s
holy
room;
his
present
music
is,
he
says,
the
same
as
the
music
he
will
play,
or
become,
in
heaven;
and
what
he
here
en­
acts
in
thought,
he
will
in
heaven
carry
out
in
action.
His
as­
similations
then
become
geographical
ones:
by
comparing
his
body
to
a
flat
map,
he
makes
his
West
his
East,
his
death
his
resurrection,
and
his
journey
to
the
afterlife
a
project
compa­
rable
to
the
earthly
journeys
of
famous
travelers,
from
Magel­
lan
to
Marco
Polo.
Even
when
Donne
turns
away
from
these
witty
coercive
analogies
to
engage
in
direct
prayer,
he
is
intent
on
a
form
of
metaphorical
religious
assimilation,
conflating
the
place
of
joy
(Paradise)
with
the
place
of
pain
(Calvary),
meta­
morphosing
one
crown
(Christ’s
crown
of
thorns)
into
another
(his
own
crown
of
salvation),
assuring
himself
that
one
bodily
fluid
(the
sweat
of
Adam’s
brow,
reproduced
by
his
own
fever)
will
be
redeemed
by
another
such
fluid
(Christ’s
blood).
In
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CHAPTER
ONE
Donne’s
final
assimilation
of
there
to
here,
he
makes
himself—
the
famous
preacher
of
sermons
in
Saint
Paul’s—both
the
of­
ficiant
at
his
own
funeral
and
the
audience
to
his
own
consola­
tory
but
minatory
sermon.
Donne’s
palpable
stylistic
effort
to
fuse
into
a
single
image
each
set
of
opposite
states
is
made
in
the
interest
of
obscuring
the
enormous
difference
between
sickroom
and
God’s
room,
death
and
eternal
life,
earthly
journeys
and
spiritual
ones,
preaching
in
public
and
praying
on
one’s
deathbed.
(In
the
event,
Donne
recovered
from
the
sickness
that
precipitated
“Hymne
to
God
my
God,
in
my
sicknesse”;
nevertheless,
the
poem
arises
from
his
conviction
that
he
is
in
the
last
moments
of
life,
about
to
enter
the
precincts
of
death.)
Here
is
this
con­
spicuously
assimilative
poem,
whose
strategy
of
denial
of
dif­
ference
breaks
down
only
in
its
closing
line:
hymne
to
god
my
god,
in
my
sicknesse
Since
I
am
comming
to
that
Holy
roome,
Where,
with
thy
Quire
of
Saints
for
evermore,
I
shall
be
made
thy
Musique;
As
I
come
I
tune
the
Instrument
here
at
the
dore,
And
what
I
must
doe
then,
thinke
here
before.
Whilst
my
Physitians
by
their
love
are
growne
Cosmographers,
and
I
their
Mapp,
who
lie
Flat
on
this
bed,
that
by
them
may
be
showne
That
this
is
my
South­west
discoverie
Per fretum febris,
by
these
straits
to
die,
I
joy,
that
in
these
straits,
I
see
my
West;
For,
though
theire
currants
yeeld
returne
to
none,
What
shall
my
West
hurt
me?
As
West
and
East
In
all
flatt
Maps
(and
I
am
one)
are
one,
So
death
doth
touch
the
Resurrection.
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LAST
BOOKS
Is
the
Pacifique
Sea
my
home?
Or
are
The
Easterne
riches?
Is
Jerusalem?
Anyan,
and
Magellan,
and
Gibraltare,
All
straits,
and
none
but
straits
are
wayes
to
them,
Whether
where
Japhet
dwelt,
or
Cham,
or
Sem.
We
thinke
that
Paradise
and
Calvarie,
Christs
Crosse,
and
Adams
tree,
stood
in
one
place;
Looke
Lord,
and
finde
both
Adams
met
in
me;
As
the
first
Adams
sweat
surrounds
my
face,
May
the
last
Adams
blood
my
soule
embrace.
So,
in
his
purple
wrapp’d
receive
mee
Lord,
By
these
his
thornes
give
me
his
other
Crowne;
And
as
to
others
soules
I
preach’d
thy
word,
Be
this
my
Text,
my
Sermon
to
mine
owne,
Therefore
that
he
may
raise
the
Lord
throws
down. 6
After
all
the
insistent
assimilating
of
the
unknown
future
side
of
the
interface,
that
of
death,
to
the
known
present
side,
that
of
life,
the
fi
nal
text
of
Donne’s
sermon
to
himself
comes
as
a
shock.
In
it
he
sharply
distinguishes—for
the
first
time
in
the
poem—the
two
sides
of
the
interface,
now
admitting
that
being
thrown
down
into
death
must
precede
being
raised
into
immortality.
He
borrows
here
from
Psalm
102:9–10,
in
which
the
psalmist
contrasts
his
former
state—being
lifted
up
by
God—with
his
present
one,
in
which
he
has
been
cast
down:
For
I
have
eaten
ashes
like
bread,
and
mingled
my
drink
with
weeping,
Because
of
thine
indignation
and
thy
wrath;
for
thou
has
lifted
me
up,
and
cast
me
down.
Donne
reverses
the
psalmist’s
order:
he
is
now
cast
down
and
wants
God
to
raise
him
up.
He
still
retains,
at
the
end,
a
trace
15
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CHAPTER
ONE
of
his
former
will
to
assimilation;
he
links
the
two
opposite
states
by
making
“raise”
the
intended
effect
of
“throws
down”
and
by
ascribing
both
equally
to
God’s
agency.
The
crucial
fi
­
nal­line
“text”
of
Donne’s
self­sermon
gains
additional
signifi
­
cance
not
only
by
its
scriptural
source
and
epigrammatic
clos­
ing
function
but
also
by
its
rhetorical
diff
erence—as
a
direct­address
homily
to
the
poet’s
own
soul—from
the
speech
act
of
prayer
to
God,
which
otherwise
organizes
the
whole
hymn.
The
striking
isolation
of
this
final
line
leads
us
to
a
back­
ward
glance
at
the
rhyme
scheme
(ababb)
of
Donne’s
stanza.
Given
its
rhymes,
the
stanza
“ought”
to
end
after
its
fourth
line,
when
its
rhyme
is
“completed,”
abab. In
stanzas
1,
2,
and
4,
con­
fi
rming
such
an
intuition,
the
fi
fth
line
is
syntactically
supple­
mentary
rather
than
essential;
in
stanzas
3
and
5,
however,
the
fifth
line
is
necessary
to
the
sense
and
thereby
justifies
its
exis­
tence.
But
the
closing
line
of
the
final
stanza,
although
essen­
tial,
is
a
cited
text
rather
than
a
personal
narration.
Th
e
per­
sonal
supplicatory
voice
of
the
dying
Donne,
insisting
on
his
imaginative
conflation
of
unknown
death
and
known
life,
has
disappeared,
vanquished
by
the
undeniable
Pauline
axiom
that
whom
the
Lord
loveth,
he
chasteneth;
whom
he
wishes
to
raise,
he
throws
down.
There
is,
then,
no
seamless
and
facile
assimilative
passage,
as
the
poet
had
hoped,
from
life
to
death.
Donne
struggles
so
hard
against
the
actual
binocular
vision
that
would
admit
cleanly
the
two
distinct
aspects,
mortal
and
immortal,
of
the
last
look,
that
his
final
collapse
into
an
admis­
sion
of
the
utter
duality
between
affl
iction
and
resurrection
sets
into
distinct
stylistic
relief
his
earlier
determination
to
make
the
afterlife
appear
a
smooth
analogue
to
living.
We
have
seen
that
in
“Hymne
to
God
my
God,
in
my
sick­
nesse,”
Donne
has
employed
a
form
of
palimpsest
(a
new
text
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written
over
a
former
incompletely
erased
one),
consistently
easing
the
fear
of
death
by
superimposing
a
“heavenly”
image
(“God’s
holy
room”)
on
an
actual
earthly
one
(the
sickroom),
the
East
of
resurrection
over
the
West
of
mortal
illness.
In
Donne’s
other
great
poem
of
death,
“A
Hymne
to
God
the
Fa­
ther,”
we
find
that
the
figure
blurring
the
sharp
interface
of
con­
tinuing
life
and
imminent
death
is
again
that
of
the
palimpsest.
This
time,
however,
it
is
a
figure
not
of
images
but
of
words,
in
which
a
single
word
or
phrase
is
reinscribed
over
itself.
Each
of
the
three
six­line
stanzas
of
the
“Hymne”
is
generated
by
the
reiterated
words
“done”
and
“more,”
and
the
first
two
stanzas
begin
“ Wilt
thou
forgive
that
sin
.
.
.
?”
By
this
repetition
we
are
made
to
realize
that
all
the
stanzas
are
variants
of
a
single
un­
derlying
template,
that
of
confession,
with
Donne
as
the
peni­
tent
and
God
as
the
confessor.
The
penitent
rehearses,
in
the
course
of
the
poem,
several
varieties
of
sin—“that
sin
where
I
begun,”“that
sin,
through
which
I
run,”“that
sin
by
which
I
have
won
/
Others
to
sin,”
and
“that
sin
which
I
did
shun”—all
of
them
singularly
unspecified,
as
though
God
were
already
aware
of
the
particulars
of
Donne’s
former
faults
that
have
generated
these
vague
categories.
Here
are
Donne’s
fi
rst
two
stanzas,
re­
inscribing“Wilt
thou
forgive
that
sin”
and
inaugurating
the
im­
mobile
rhymes
that
create
the
superposition
of
successive
sins,
past
and
present:
I.
Wilt
thou
forgive
that
sinne
where
I
begunne,
Which
is
my
sin,
though
it
were
done
before?
Wilt
thou
forgive
that
sinne,
through
which
I
runne,
And
do
run
still:
though
still
I
do
deplore?
When
thou
hast
done,
thou
hast
not
done,
For,
I
have
more.
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CHAPTER
ONE
II.
Wilt
thou
forgive
that
sinne
by
which
I
have
wonne
Others
to
sinne?
and,
made
my
sinne
their
doore?
Wilt
thou
forgive
that
sinne
which
I
did
shunne
A
yeare,
or
two:
but
wallowed
in,
a
score?
When
thou
hast
done,
thou
hast
not
done,
For
I
have
more.
The
third
version
inscribed
on
the
template
of
confession
will
end
the
poem,
which
until
this
point
has
been
playing
with
fi
ve
tenses:
the
future
(“Wilt
thou
forgive”);
the
present
(“which
is
my
sin”);
the
present
perfect
(“by
which
I
have
won”);
the
im­
perfect
(“wallowed
in
a
score”);
and
the
future
perfect
(“When
thou
hast
done”—the
equivalent
of
“when
you
will
have
for­
given
all
those”).
By
phrasing
the
future
perfect
as
though
it
were
the
present
perfect
(“When
thou
hast
done”),
Donne
sus­
pends
his
poem
in
an
uncertain
moment—that
of
a
hoped­for
future
represented
as
though
it
has
already
happened.
Because
the
third
version
of
the
confession
must
maintain
the
unswerving
template
rhymes
on
“done”
and
“more,”
it
must
resemble
its
predecessors;
but
since
it
has
to
resolve
the
poem,
it
must
differ
from
them.
In
the
closing
stanza,
Donne
for
the
first
time
makes
a
confession
in
which
he
specifies
his
sin:
“I
have
a
sin
of
fear.”
And
for
the
fi
rst
time
he
envisages
a
future
not
God’s
(“Wilt
thou
forgive”)
but
his
own—a
future
of
dam­
nation
where
he
may
“perish
on
the
shore.”
Because
he
has—
with
the
word
“perish”—at
last
admitted
the
abyss
separating
death
from
life,
he
can
banish
all
his
tense­splitting
and
look
to
a
diff
erent
model
of
hope,
not
that
of
tensed
time
but
that
of
the
untensed
eternity
of
the
resplendent
son
of
God:
III.
I
have
a
sinne
of
feare,
that
when
I
have
spunne
My
last
thred,
I
shall
perish
on
the
shore;
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But
sweare
by
thy
selfe,
that
at
my
death
thy
sonne
Shall
shine
as
he
shines
now,
and
heretofore;
And,
having
done
that,
Thou
haste
done,
I feare
no
more.
Donne
has
resolved
his
earlier
uneasy
slippage
among
tenses
by
directing
his
last
look
at
the
perpetual
presence
of
the
Son/
Sun,
who
“shall
shine”
(at
the
death
to
come)
as
he
“shines
now”
(in
the
poet’s
present)
and
as
he
shone
“heretofore”
(in
the
past).
The
poet’s
death,
in
consequence,
is
no
longer
envisaged
within
a
temporal
continuum
of
uncertain
hope
or
terrifi
ed
fear,
but
is
absorbed
within
the
timelessness
of
providential
re­
demption.
Through
his
emphasis
on
tenses,
Donne
demon­
strates
stylistically
the
anxiety
which
seeks
to
obscure
the
dis­
tinction
between
death
and
life;
that
anxiety
flitters
between
the
present,
the
recent
past,
the
continuous
past,
the
ancestral
past
(evoked
by
“heretofore”),
the
future,
and
the
future
per­
fect.
Anxious
ourselves
under
the
flurry
of
Donne’s
constantly
changing
tenses,
we
are
relieved
when
Donne
turns
his
gaze
from
time
to
eternity,
at
last
making
God’s
sworn
“done”
match
the
fate
of
“Donne.”
The
normal
human
resistance
to
contem­
plating
the
unimaginable
fissure
between
life
and
death
gener­
ates,
in
Donne’s
aggressively
visible
manner,
the
manufacture
of
a
confusing
multiplicity
of
times
until,
in
the
third
stanza,
the
poet
can,
by
finally
admitting
the
danger
of
perishing
on
death’s “shore,”
forsake
body­time
in
favor
of
soul­time
and
end
his
poem.
George
Herbert
could
not
be
more
different
from
Donne
in
the
strategy
he
adopts
when
depicting
the
encounter
of
life
and
death.
While
Donne
strove
to
allay
anxiety
by
assimilating
one
state
to
the
other,
Herbert,
in
“Death,”
is
so
deeply
intent
on
drawing
the
ghastly
contrast
between
life
and
death
that
he
at
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ONE
first
exhibits
unconcealed
revulsion
as
he
brings
his
skeletal
Death­figure
into
view.
As
we
have
seen,
the
skull,
open­
mouthed,
cannot
sing;
open­socketed,
it
can
shed
no
tears;
af­
ter
some
years
in
the
grave,
the
flesh
that
had
clothed
the
skel­
eton
has
turned
to
dust;
and
the
bones
of
the
corpse
have
degenerated
into
mere
sticks.
Artists’
paintings
and
woodcuts
of
skeletons
in
the
Dance
of
Death
lie
behind
Herbert’s
grim
vanitas
of
the
mortal
bodies
of
his
companions
in
life;
as
for
the
winged
souls
of
the
poet’s
dead,
they
have
departed
from
their
earthly
nest,
leaving
behind
only
the
empty
and
lifeless
shells
from
which
they
have
fl
own.
The
purely
naturalistic
look
at
Death
in
the
first
half
of
Herbert’s
poem
is
“uncontaminated”
by
any
consolation
except
the
past
tense
in
which
it
is
voiced;
the
souls
of
the
dead,
says
the
poet,
have
vanished
into
invisi­
bility,
and
graveside
mourners
confront
only
their
dust,
which
extorts
tears.
Herbert
presents
this
opening
naturalistic
last
look
as
a
temporally
mistaken
one,
but
he
does
not
yet
tell
us
how
to
correct
it:
Death,
thou
wast
once
an
uncouth
hideous
thing,
Nothing
but
bones,
The
sad
effect
of
sadder
grones:
Thy
mouth
was
open,
but
thou
couldst
not
sing.
For
we
consider’d
thee
as
at
some
six
Or
ten
yeares
hence,
After
the
losse
of
life
and
sense,
Flesh
being
turn’d
to
dust,
and
bones
to
sticks.
We
lookt
on
this
side
of
thee,
shooting
short;
Where
we
did
finde
The
shells
of
fledge
souls
left
behinde,
Dry
dust,
which
sheds
no
tears,
but
may
extort.
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“We
lookt
on
this
side
of
thee,
shooting
short,”
explains
the
poet;
what
would
it
be
to
shoot
the
arrows
of
sight
farther,
so
as
to
gain
a
view
of
the
other
side
of
the
body’s
encounter
with
Death?
What
can
Herbert
do
in
the
second
half
of
his
poem
to
be
“fair”
to
Death
and
make
it
seem
less
“uncouth”?
In
his
eff
ort
to
reclaim
Death
from
hideousness,
must
he
erase
its
connec­
tion
with
bones
and
dust?
Can
he
console
himself—as
many
less
talented
Christian
poets
have
done—by
obliterating
the
decay
of
the
mortal
body
in
favor
of
the
glory
of
the
immortal
soul
in
heaven?
We
find
that
Herbert
does
not
ignore
our
natural
attach­
ment
to
the
body
robbed
from
us
by
Death.
Instead
(he
says
reassuringly),
since
we
are
enabled
by
the
death
of
Christ
to
look
through
dying
rather
than
at
it,
we
can
view
in
prospect
our
natural
bodies
at
the
Last
Judgment,
when,
in
glorifi
ed
form,
wearing
their
“new
array,”
they
will
have
rejoined
our
waiting
souls.
Herbert
can
then
address
Death
in
new
terms:
no
longer
aesthetically
repellent,
it
has
become
“full
of
grace,”
attractive,
something
sought
after:
But
since
our
Saviours
death
did
put
some
bloud
Into
thy
face;
Thou
art
grown
fair
and
full
of
grace,
Much
in
request,
much
sought
for,
as
a
good.
For
we
do
now
behold
thee
gay
and
glad,
As
at
dooms­day;
When
souls
shall
wear
their
new
array,
And
all
thy
bones
with
beautie
shall
be
clad.
Therefore
we
can
go
die
as
sleep,
and
trust
Half
that
we
have
Unto
an
honest
faithfull
grave;
Making
our
pillows
either
down,
or
dust.
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CHAPTER
ONE
At
Herbert’s
doomsday,
our
past
as
bones
is
not
erased;
nor
do
we
now,
even
when
reminded
of
our
glorious
eventual
destiny,
forget
our
present
potential
to
become
dust
at
any
moment.
But
the
joyful
change
of
attitude
brought
about
by
“our
Sav­
iours
death”
(as
the
ambience
of
Herbert’s
poem
alters
from
a
materialistic
view
of
the
skeleton
to
a
Christian
one)
has
to
be
made
real,
stylistically,
in
the
bald
light
of
what
we
already
know
from
looking
directly
at
the
grave’s
“hideous”
bones.
Death
has
undergone
the
sort
of
magical
transformation
into
a
human
figure
that
is
familiar
in
folktale
and
legend.
Th
e
con­
gratulatory
air
of
Herbert’s
fourth
and
fifth
stanzas
has
the
poet’s
usual
touch
of
comedy­in­seriousness:
Death
is
at
pres­
ent
a
celebrity
much
in
request,
newly
adorned
by
the
poet
with
alliterative
phrases
drawn
from
the
lexicon
of
legend—
“fair
and
full
of
grace,”“gay
and
glad.”
The
little
joke
of
Death’s
social
rehabilitation
can
then
be
laid
aside
for
the
earnest
fu­
ture­tense
doomsday
vision,
as
newly
arrayed
souls
rejoice,
clad
no
longer
in
a
mortal
garment,
as
in
the
past,
but
in
an
eternal
“beautie,”
which
by
alliterating
with
“bloud”
(of
Jesus)
and
“bones”
(of
the
dead)
connects
forever
the
aesthetic,
the
re­
demptive,
and
the
mortal.
It
would
be
a
different
matter
en­
tirely
had
Herbert
forsaken
the
bones
for
something
else:
[“When
souls
shall
wear
their
new
array,
/
And
in
their
glory
be
by
beautie
clad.”]7
No:
Herbert
is
not
so
much
describing
doomsday
as
speaking
to
the
very
concept
of
Death;
not
“their”
bones
but
“thy”
bones.
Even
the
bony
skeletal
form
takes
on
imputed
radiance
when
Death
is
seen
as
our
necessary
con­
veyor
to
an
aesthetically
superior
body.
As
he
draws
his
gentle
closing
moral,
Herbert
drops
the
ad­
dress
to
Death
in
order
to
speak
to
and
for
us.
We
need
not
fear
the
sudden
death
that
comes
like
a
thief
in
the
night;
it
would
only
hasten
the
day
when
we
receive
our
transfi
gured
body.
The
body,
which
is
the
only
thing
Death
can
touch,
is
only
half
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of
us;
the
other
half,
the
soul,
is
immortal.
The
grave
is
only
another
bed,
where
our
body
will
sleep
until
doomsday.
In
the
certain
faith
of
redemption,
Herbert
says,
we
can
go
to
sleep
or
to
death
with
equal
trust.
But
Herbert,
while
affi
rming
this
faith,
does
not
deny
the
chilling
character
of
the
posthumous
interim
of
decay:
if
we
sleep
on
a
down
pillow
in
our
bed,
we
must
sleep
on
a
pillow
of
dust
in
the
grave.
By
ending
his
poem
on
the
word
“dust,”
Herbert
is
faithful
to
his
first,
naturalistic,
look
at
Death;
but
by
rhyming
“dust”
with
“trust,”
as
he
at
last
looks
through
Death,
Herbert
recapitulates
his
entire
argu­
ment
for
a
new
view
of
Death.
By
alliterating“down”
and
“dust,”
Herbert
suggests
how
easily
“we
can
go
die
as
sleep.”
Th
e
grave
is
“honest”
and
“faithfull”
because
it
is
charged
with
rendering
back,
on
the
Last
Day,
every
grain
of
dust
that
it
contains:
it
is
a
good
and
faithful
servant.
The
satisfying
conclusiveness
of
the
ending
of
“Death”
de­
pends
on
Herbert’s
efforts
to
transcribe
fairly
both
the
human
last
look
at,
and
the
Christian
last
look
through,
Death,
as
he
depicts,
in
his
binocular
style,
the
hideous
beside
the
glorious,
conjoining
his
original
pity
for
ugly
Death
with
the
subsequent
admiring
of
him
once
he
is
beautified
by
Christ’s
sacrifi
ce.
Her­
bert’s
fastidiousness
and
aesthetic
intensity
recoiled
from
the
sight
of
the
charnel
house
of
Death;
his
Christian
convictions
granted
him
(to
use
Wordsworth’s
words)
“the
faith
that
looks
through
death”;
but
only
his
personal
kindness
invented
the
little
fable
that
lets
Death
be
new
clad
in
a
garment
suitable
for
the
celestial
wedding
feast.
“Our
Saviour”
has
saved
hideous
Death,
as
well
as
sinful
mankind.
Even
a
non­Christian
can
relish
Herbert’s
tender
effort
to
rehabilitate
Death
and
can
un­
derstand
why,
for
an
aesthete,
Doomsday
must
regenerate
ev­
erything,
even
Death
itself,
in
an
achieved
beauty.
As
we
recall
the
older
poems’
efforts
to
be
just
to
the
inter­
face
of
death
and
life,
to
create
a
genuinely
binocular
last
look,
23
Copyrighted Material
CHAPTER
ONE
we
have
seen
that
Waller’s
poem
“Of
the
Last
Verses
in
the
Book,”
although
it
draws
nearer
to
illumination
as
it
progresses,
succeeds
in
retaining
the
“old”
battered
and
decayed
body
even
on
the
very
threshold
of
the
new
world.
And
while
both
of
Donne’s
two
“Hymns”
make
an
aggrieved
effort
to
refuse
the
fearful
nature
of
dying
by
assimilating
it
to
living,
that
self­de­
ceiving
effort
collapses,
not
only
in
the
poet’s
self­sermon
ad­
mitting
the
distinct
difference
between
being
painfully
thrown
down
and
being
gloriously
raised,
but
also
in
the
abolition
of
shifting
human
tenses
in
favor
of
Donne’s
acknowledgment
of
the
Son’s
tenseless
eternity.
Each
of
these
stylistic
choices
at­
tempts
in
the
end
to
be
accurate
and
even­handed
in
its
last
look:
so
much
for
life,
so
much
for
death.
But
in
these
Chris­
tian
poems
of
faith,
the
balance
is
necessarily
tipped,
as
we
see,
against
death.
On
the
other
hand,
in
“The
Hermitage
at
the
Center”
and
“Christmas
Tree”
we
have
glimpsed
what
may
happen
when
the
concept
of
an
afterlife
is
no
longer
available
to
poets
taking
the
last
look.
As
we
consider
poems
from
the
last
books
of
Ste­
vens,
Plath,
Lowell,
Bishop,
and
Merrill,
we
will
see
them
striv­
ing
to
do
justice
to
difficult
truths
through
stylistic
means.
Weighing
fairly
what
it
means
to
be
alive
but
mortal,
they
hope
to
find
a
manner
that
can
take
in,
in
a
single
steady
gaze,
life
and
death.
Stevens’s
looks
at
the
worst;
Plath’s
struggle
be­
tween
melodrama
and
restraint;
Lowell’s
account
of
death
as
a
set
of
successive
subtractions
from
an
always
vital
existence;
Bishop’s
oscillations
between
being
caught
in
the
body
and
be­
ing
freed
into
expression;
and
Merrill’s
resort
to
a
renewed
na­
ïveté
before
the
indescribable
future
will
all
appear
as
heartfelt
stylistic
responses
to
a
creative
predicament
faced
by
poets
un­
able
to
assume
an
afterlife.
24